More than one piece in the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s repertory at the Wang last week began and ended with the dancers in motion. For most of the others, the curtain would go up on a solo figure or a sculptural group that was fixed in place for several heartbeats, imprinting a picture on the audience’s mind and cranking up an unbearable desire for things to get going. It’s as if the dancers couldn’t get enough movement, and the audience felt the same way.

AILEY WEEK, proclaimed the Wang marquee, and incredibly, this was the company’s 32nd appearance in Boston under the ægis of the Celebrity Series. Over these years the Ailey has cultivated a very solid appeal for the mainstream audience. It had no trouble competing with several other shows in town, including what one man standing on a ticket line called “Less Miz.” At this point I don’t see much difference between the Ailey’s bill of fare and a blockbuster musical show. The Ailey has the patina of high art, but its effect is the same.

Ten dances constituted the repertory for the week’s seven performances, and after looking at all 10, I was thinking about how the company has evolved its recipe for success. I go back even further than 1969 with the Ailey: I remember Revelations when it had about six dancers, and now there are close to 20. You don’t always improve a dance when you make it bigger, but it does get more visible. I hadn’t seen Blues Suite (1958) in years, and the signature stepladder, now a tower, looks more like something in a Robert Wilson epic than a prop in a funky bordello. The old dances are greatly changed, but I guess they still carry enough nostalgic cues to shed humanism onto what’s become a feast of physicality.

Blues Suite was one of the earliest Ailey choreographies, and together with Revelations (1960) it anchored half a century of African-American theater dance by Ailey and his many descendants. Alvin Ailey had a rather eclectic dance training — mainly Lester Horton technique, and a smattering of other modern dance and show styles — but his early choreography was rooted firmly in the black churches and bars of his seedy childhood in Texas and Los Angeles. His music was jazz and gospel songs and spirituals. His dancers had to be characters as well as movers. They wore little slips and shawls and crumpled fedoras. They bounced with the joy of sociability, ran from the Devil, nearly toppling over backward when their desperate strides stretched too far. They soared with inexhaustible faith. They wiggled and strutted and did the Suzy Q and stooped over to ease their aching sacroiliacs.

This was at a time when modern dancers had bare feet, leotards, and stringently abstract technique. They wanted to look as little like walking-around citizens as possible. Popular music was unheard of on the modern dance stage; you certainly didn’t dance to it and risk the taint of show biz. The few black concert dancers that were around were definitely not supposed to flaunt their blackness. Alvin Ailey made these taboos acceptable as art.

What’s happened since then is a big story of our culture getting slicker, smarter, and less personal. The Ailey rep exemplifies that story. The characters so arduously carved out by those first dancers have become stereotypes. Ailey’s movement developed into a style all its own — almost a code. Shapes, phrases, gestures once expressive and spontaneous got used again and again in his own choreography, adopted by others, and inculcated into hundreds of future dancers and choreographers at the Ailey school. The movements became signs. Instead of a baptismal ceremony where the participants spin in praise with their arms angled up and out, a woman spins in the same position in another dance (Ronald K. Brown’s Grace, for instance) and we take her for a priestess. The original Backwater duet in Blues, a playful, rueful seduction, has filtered down to 15 minutes of elaborate, violent, sexy movement for two couples and a trio in Ulysses Dove’s Bad Blood.

This depersonalizing and abstracting of the movement has robbed choreography (not just in the Ailey repertory) of some kinds of truth that technique alone can’t convey. Ailey’s Blues was all codified movement the other night, until Dudley Williams, unannounced, walked onto the stage near the end. Thin and spunky, snapping his suspenders, he strode around the edges of the scene, made sly overtures to the women, sucked in his pride as one of them flounced off, gave his arm to another. Williams, who’s about 60 and the senior member of the Ailey company, preserves the specificity and spontaneity that the younger dancers don’t bother with.

Carmen de Lavallade’s new duet, Sweet Bitter Love, seemed to be trying to recapture that sense of active character. The piece opened in a long, portentous silence, with crickets, a misty moon, and Glenn A. Sims poised in anticipation. The movement, with its changes of direction, off-center balances, and odd dislocations, suggested a character who can’t make up his mind, but Sims looked strange, robotic, as if he couldn’t figure how to make it work physically.

When Renee Robinson appeared, they began a romantic dance to popular songs by Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack, but their relationship — and their movement — betrayed the same ambivalence, the same conflicting trajectories. After Robinson’s solo of regret, there was a false ending. With the audience cheering Robinson, Sims started to enter, hesitated, then left before she saw him. I didn’t know whether this enigmatic resolution was a mistake or a dramaturgical brainstorm.

Ailey style is defined in choreographic tropes as well as individual movements. There’s the famous Revelations wedge — I saw it in at least two other dances last week — where dancers cluster center stage, bending and reaching together, their hands splayed in mute appeal. There’s the big unison line-up, the sensuous duet countered by a comical one, the thrill-packed explosions of male dancing and the luscious, mincing parades of women.

Two of the other Boston premieres, Dwight Rhoden’s Chocolate Sessions and Alonzo King’s Following the Subtle Current Upstream, depended on flashy abstractions like these, as did the pieces by Ulysses Dove and Ron Brown. Ailey perfected them in Night Creature (1974) and Phases (1980). Rhoden’s new piece was fidgety, with the dancers in skimpy, bare-midriff outfits that got skimpier as the dancing-per-square-inch increased. King introduced a few original moves — break-dance slides into classical positions, for instance — but stuck to the pattern of wall-to-wall action, steamy partnering, and curvy shapes.

Company artistic director Judith Jamison resisted the tide of nothing-to-look-at-but-those-gorgeous-bodies in her new Double Exposure. The costumes for the two men and three women were a little more covered up, though midway through the piece all the dancers exchanged their clothes (open shirts and pants for the men, evening gowns for the women) for identical ones in different colors. There may have been some symbolic significance in this transformation — or perhaps it was just a product of lavish funding. The dance was commissioned by last year’s Lincoln Center Festival.

Matthew Rushing plays a kind of techno-man, in black and gray. He pops his arms, punches into spins that end in pitched-over arabesques, gyrates sometimes stiff, sometimes floppy, always dwarfed by a background of electronic pulsing and mysterious projections — what looked like a solar flare, and later a fold of stirred paint, an eagle, a pixilated grid that came closer and closer until you could almost see people in the spaces. (“Media Concept and Creation” by Art in Commerce, Robert Ruggieri, creative director and composer, plus too many other design contributors to list here.)

Another man arrives, perhaps Rushing’s twin or his alter ego (Glenn A. Sims), and for the rest of the dance they mirror each other, oppose each other, and ineffectually mingle with the three women, whose identity is unclear — that character question again. Perhaps they’re muses or fates; they act as witnesses to Rushing’s dilemma more often than they participate in it. At moments Rushing uses a palm-size video camera to project his own or Sims’s close-up face onto the screen, and at the very end of the dance there’s a kind of recognition scene between the twins. By this time the men are wearing saturated blue and green costumes and the women have traded their red, purple, and orange dresses for black and gray.

I couldn’t find my way out of this psychological murk, but its very lack of clarity made it interesting. Again, large-scale effects — supplied by the projections, lighting, and electronic sounds rather than a huge cast — compensated for an underdeveloped dramatic scheme.

Issue Date: April 26-May 3, 2001